A Provocative Argument About What Creates Serial Killers

The Atlantic

18-06-2025

Caroline Fraser grew up in an area defined by unexpected, stochastic bursts of brutality. By the time she was a teen, in the 1970s, she knew of multiple people in and around her Mercer Island, Washington, community who'd died violently: Some were murdered; others had killed themselves. Intimate-partner violence was often a factor. So, too, was the floating bridge connecting the island to Seattle, where accidental deaths happened at an alarming rate. There was menace and dread in her own home as well, thanks to her father.
Even after Fraser left, she found that she couldn't shake thoughts of the violence. She was captivated by the sheer number of serial killers running amok in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s and '80s. Why, she wanted to know, did there seem to be so many men, born during or just after World War II, killing scores of women—frequently strangers to them—in brutal, compulsive ways?
Men such as the Green River Killer, the Happy Face Killer, and the I-5 Killer operated mainly in Washington and Oregon, burglarizing homes, menacing hitchhikers, raping co-eds, and dumping bodies. Only when they were caught were faces put to those nicknames: Gary Ridgway, Keith Jesperson, Randall Woodfield, and their ilk became subjects of widespread fascination and horror. Today, those men—the Ted Bundys of the world, to name the most famous example—remain valuable grist for the dozens of true-crime books, podcasts, and documentaries put out each year.
When Fraser, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, began looking into the project that would become her new book, Murderland, which is both a memoir of growing up during the serial-killing era and a unique investigation into its potential causes, she found a 'rising tide of inconceivable deviance,' she writes. It was localized to a specific time and place, and reproduced almost nowhere else in the country, without a larger explanation. And to Fraser's frustration, even in the 21st century, true-crime chroniclers mostly didn't probe the possibility of a systemic explanation for all of this death.
But Fraser had an idea, one she'd not seen explored. When she was young, and when these men were terrorizing her region, industrial smelters were extracting elements such as iron, copper, lead, aluminum, and zinc from ores. Those plants were also pumping out continuous plumes of toxic vapors, releasing lead and arsenic into the environment. During the years that the smelters operated, these elements were present in the air; even after the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, their airborne assaults were only beginning to taper off. Fraser kept finding threads between environmental catastrophe and murder, and in Murderland, she makes the unconventional argument that the rise of serial killing has deep roots in the creation of industrial waste. The connection isn't as far-fetched as it may appear.
Data bear out the relationship between elevated lead presence and increased crime rates. A 2022 meta-analysis of two dozen papers provided more evidence for the connection, and noted that exposure to lead, a neurotoxin, might amplify aggressive and impulsive behaviors. Once its harms were fully understood, leaded gasoline, a major source of exposure, was phased out beginning in 1973; it was fully out of use by 1996. New lead paint and lead pipes were also banned in the 1970s and '80s. In 1994, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the mean blood lead levels of those aged 1 to 74 declined 78 percent from 1976 to 1991. Children born after these interventions had less exposure than those raised in the decades before.
Now consider the sharp drop in violent crime, particularly murder, in the country's most populated metro area, New York City, starting in the 1990s, after a terrifying peak of 2,245 murders in 1990. As of this writing, there have been 112 murders in all five boroughs in 2025, the lowest number in city history, according to the New York City Police D epartment. Two generations of NYC children have grown up with minimal lead presence in city apartment buildings, and academics such as the Amherst College economics professor Jessica Wolpaw Reyes have argued that lower levels of lead exposure in childhood correlate to reduced criminality.
Setting up a tripartite structure of murder, industrial history, and memoir is a complicated task. Fraser comes close to pulling it off, as Murderland is wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down. But in casting about for a grand unified theory connecting serial murder to a larger environmental phenomenon, Fraser falls into a trap I've taken to calling the 'Bundy Problem': Whenever he's present in a story, even if the focus turns elsewhere, he dominates it; the abominable details of his myth, such as the sheer number of his victims and the enraging failures of law enforcement, take up all the available air. Bundy is the malware of narrative. By focusing on him, Fraser relegates her thesis about the damage done by pollution to the background. More important, Bundy's actual victims, the dozens of women and girls whose lives he snuffed out, grow ever dimmer.
'Welcome to the crazy wall,' Fraser announces in the book's introduction. She compares her investigation to the trope of crime obsessives or TV detectives who stew over a board full of clues and ephemera, pushing 'pins into wall maps, trying to find the pattern, to analyze, to snatch a cloud and pin it down.' At best, they may come up with the culprit; at worst, they tumble into the dark realm of conspiracy theory. Fraser is ready to show her work, piecing together her collection of pictures, timelines, and surveys 'until the whole thing resembles a graph of sheer lunacy, a visual eruption of obsession.'
Fraser, most recently the author of a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won a Pulitzer, seems an unlikely candidate to spend years of her life marinating in the granular minutiae of serial killers. But she has explored facets of violence and narrative in several essays published by The New York Review of Books, including two on Joyce Carol Oates and a separate 2021 article, 'Murder Is My Business,' on the state of true crime (full disclosure: She included my 2020 anthology, Unspeakable Acts, in her article). That last essay, Fraser acknowledges, 'proved essential in contemplating' the project that became Murderland.
Fraser doesn't believe it's a coincidence that would-be serial murderers grew up near industrial sites expelling heavy metals. Ted Bundy, the author's main case study, was born in 1946 to an unwed mother with uncertain paternity and raised in the Skyline neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington, as leaded-gas fumes wafted through the streets. Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, was born three years after Bundy and resided a couple of miles from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where highway and jet-fuel vapors mixed with the lead-loaded air. Even the cross-country-traveling serial murderer Israel Keyes, not born until 1978, had a childhood connection to a remaining industrial plant in the Colville, Washington, area.
The author lays much of the blame at the feet of two Gilded Age families: the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims. The Rockefellers made their money in oil, and the Guggenheims in mining; they would later both own (and fight for control of) the profitable American Smelting and Refining Company, later known as ASARCO. ASARCO ended up all over the country, but Tacoma proved particularly attractive for its potential access to minerals. For nearly a century, a smokestack hundreds of feet high shot lead and arsenic into the sky.
But the dangers of smelting weren't unknown. In 1913, the chemist Frederick Gardner Cottrell wrote: 'The problem of smelter smoke is entirely distinct from that of ordinary city smoke.' Components such as zinc, sulfur dioxide, lead, and arsenic, he continued, 'cannot be simply 'burnt up.'' Instead, they linger in the air, are absorbed into the bloodstream, make their way into the soil, and get passed down from mothers to fetuses. Those living in proximity to a smelter plant were experiencing a slow-motion health disaster. Fraser writes about how ASARCO, like tobacco companies, attempted to downplay the dangers. By the 1970s, the company's claims strained credibility.
At the same time, a seeming plague of serial murder was reaching an apex. Fraser juxtaposes the rise and fall of smelting with Bundy's escalating spree of crimes, characterizing each murder he committed not only as an individual act of abrupt violence, but also as one part of a wider system of senselessness. The story ought to be, she argues, that the oligarchs who saw opportunity and profit in an industry that would sicken scores of Americans also created an even more disturbing by-product in the form of these murders. But although Fraser does her damnedest to avoid it, Bundy repeatedly steals focus from the muck of smelter waste. Perhaps it's inevitable that systemic, slow-motion violence feels less dramatic than individuals killing individuals: After all, these men actively chose, sometimes again and again, to end another person's life. The fumes are certainly easier to ignore or deny than the visceral, immediate violence of serial murder—which is much rarer, and yet, for many, much more frightening.
Fraser works tirelessly to make her correlations convincing. Her anger at environmental destruction, at men's capacity to hate and murder women in wholly novel ways, and at the indifference of American society is clear. But even though I was carried along by the narrative, I wondered if adding 'a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma' truly offered the explanation she sought.
Other factors may have played a role in the overall reduction of crime rates since lead was phased out of American daily life: increased police presence in major cities; the growing sophistication of detecting and matching DNA evidence; surveillance, with cameras—in pockets, on buildings—absolutely everywhere. And different social-impact theories have also been put forward: The economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt have connected legalized abortion with lower crime rates, for example. The serial-killing era, which saw more than 100 of these murderers acting simultaneously in a given year, is firmly in the rearview mirror, and rates of other violent acts have trended downward since the mid-1990s.
The Bundy Problem may help explain why Americans perceive modern crime rates, especially rape and murder, as sky-high—an understanding not rooted in reality. Male-on-female violence is, undeniably, a continuing scourge. But culturally, we tend to ignore its most common manifestations—60 percent of murdered women are killed by an intimate partner or family member—in favor of the vivid image of girls menaced by outwardly charming but secretly sinister figures, such as Bundy. This is not a formula that allows us to consider how the misogyny that animated many of the serial killers of the 20th century was encouraged or shared by their wider culture.
Even Fraser fails to account for this: If elevated lead levels caused the violence, why did it remain skewed along gender lines? (From 1900 to 2010, 88.6 percent of all serial killers, and more than 90 percent of those in the United States, were male; just over 51 percent of their victims, however, were female, though white women were the most likely group to be murdered.) She doesn't fully pursue that question. Nor does she satisfactorily answer why, if industrial pollution was nationwide, there was a serial-killing cluster specifically in the Pacific Northwest.
Perhaps my own crazy wall is different. It posits that people who end up killing and people who don't aren't initially that much different from one another, and a confluence of random and semi-random events—broken homes, sexual trauma, poverty—might contribute to future violence, but also might not. My wall craves narrative but also knows that human behavior can be mystifying, and that attempting to make order from chaos is doomed to fail.
There is value in seeing a bigger picture, and I'm glad to have followed the threads that Fraser unspooled. But there is equal, if not greater, value in accepting what we don't, and can't, know. And if the horrific uptick in serial killing remains an unexplained phenomenon, yet fewer women and girls today suffer from this unspeakable violence, then I can live with that.